Topic Streams and Pull Requests

Topic Streams are great when you want to make isolated changes, experiment and re-integrate them later into your mainline stream. They work together with Pull Requests – a type of review that allows to evaluate a set of changes and orchestrate their automatic integration into the target stream.

From Visual Studio integration you can create a topic stream with New > Topic Stream command:

When creating a new topic stream you can choose an option to reuse your existing solution work area by rehoming it. Rehome will convert your existing work area and align it with the new stream, it is faster than fetching to a clean work area.

After the topic stream is created you can access its pull request from the Dimensions Explorer:

Using the pull request you can review and approve the changes made in a topic stream. Depending on Dimensions Pulse settings, an automatic merge to the target stream may happen.

Pull requests are also accessible from the Reviews panel:

View enhancements

Baselines panel now has the same design as the requests panel:

Streams and Projects panel also updated, now it supports search and can show recent and favorite streams or projects:

In 14.4 release Visual Studio integration has seen a lot of improvement. The focus of the changes was improving usability, discoverability and modernizing the look.

Redesigned Dimensions Explorer

We’ve made significant investment into updating the look and usability of Dimensions Explorer, previously known as Serena Explorer. It’s a single place where you can read current solution state, access views and operations. It eliminates ambiguity and clearly displays current solution context.

Often used as a starting point to begin work, Dimensions Explorer provides hints and informs about next steps:

Themes Support

Themes are available in Visual Studio 2012 and newer, and Visual Studio integration views now react to theme changes on the fly.

Light theme

Blue theme

Dark theme

Integrated Peer Review Process

With Dimensions CM Pulse, peer review process is very easy. It is a powerful tool to review changes, make comments, view code annotations and collaborate. It is accessible from Visual Studio Integration with Reviews panel. You can switch between different display modes and work with reviews inside the IDE.

Reviews panel

Doing code review:

Repository Browser

Ever wanted to view repository structure? Easy to do with Repository Browser view. Navigate folders, view file content, and see who made the changes.

Repository browser

Better Requests View

Completely redesigned Requests view displays requests in a usable, easy to find way. Three view selectors allow switching between display modes. Type text in the search field to narrow down the list of requests. Search works for any of the visible columns. Its look and feel is consistent with Reviews panel, and it’s very easy to use.

Micro Focus is very happy to announce that we have secured the venues and dates for our 2019 Software Change and Configuration Management Customer Advisory Boards. This is a free event that we are hosting for our SCCM customers of AccuRev, StarTeam, and Dimensions CM.

For 2019 we are very pleased to announce that we will be holding the US CAB in Las Vegas.

Please watch this space for updates.

Full details are noted below and please let myself, Jimmy and Arlene know if you want to secure your place and we will follow up with full logistics.

Las Vegas

Aria Hotel and Casino

2 day event on 15th and 16th May 2019

To secure your place at these events please contact myself, Jimmy O'Rourke and Tim Flynn via the email addresses below:

David.Howland@microfocus.com

James.ORourke@microfocus.com

arlene.holmes@microfocus.com

If you have not attended an SCCM CAB before let me provide further details:

What is a CAB?:

CAB is Short for Customer Advisory Board.

A meeting between Micro Focus Customers and various departments within Micro Focus. This usually consists of the support team, product manager, R&D team and other customer advocates.

The meetings are usually 2 days long with an opportunity on the second day for one to one personal meetings.

The CAB events are highly interactive collaboration between Micro Focus and it’s customers to help drive the future of the product, build a more personal relationship and also to provide additional value on the maintenance plans paid to Miro Focus.

Why have a CAB?

To often product decisions can be made in a bubble and without clear customer direction, Micro Focus wants clear customer direction on product strategy.

Benefit of meeting with many customers vs individual trips. Plus, customers love hearing from other customers as opposed to the product vendor.

CAB allows for PM, Dev, Support and CAM’s to interact in a more intimate setting rather than over email or web meetings.

Better insight and understanding about how your products are being used in the market place.

Relationship building.

Customers get to present their deployment of the product and the benefits it brings to their org.

Plus a host of other benefits including swag bags of branded merchandise, offsite dinners and Micro Focus executives (VP level) will be in attendance.

The following document describes the steps used that cover a standard parallel development scenario across two streams.

The attached document describes a practical 6 step scenario working on both the mainline and patch development and how Araxis Merge can be used to help assist the merge conflicts.

Step 1: Main Line Development (Version 1.0) Step 2: Work on a Branch Patch Release (Version 1.1) Step 3: Make a patch modification (Version 1.1) Step 4: Main Line Development (Version 2.0) Step 5: Merge the branch modifications into the mainline Step 6: Review the merge